>There was apparently an n+1 forum on 'What was the hipster?' last year -
>but it doesn't seem like any of the talks are online. I would have liked
>to read Jace Clayton's piece as he's always good value. There is a
>write-up here, implying that the main idea was that the hipster is always
>someone else:
>http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/the-death-of-the-hipster-panel/
>"[...]The hipster, then, is the boogeyman who keeps us from becoming too
>settled in our identity, keeps us moving forward into new fashions, keep
>us consuming more “creatively†and discovering new things that
>haven’t become lame and hipster. We keep consuming more, and more
>cravenly, yet this always seems to us to be the hipster’s fault, not our
>own. "One must start with the premise that the hipster is defined by a
>lack of authenticity, by a sense of lateness to the scene, or by the fact
>that his arrival fashions the scene—transforms people who are doing their
>thing into a sellf-conscious scene, something others can scrutinize and
>exploit. The hipster is that person who shows up and seems to ruin
>things—then you can begin to ask why this persoon exists, whether he is
>inevitable, whether he can be stopped, and what it will take. The
>hipster’s presence specifically forms the illusion of inside and
>outside, and the idea that others will pay for the privilege of being
>shown through the gate.
>"The audience didn’t regard the quest for a stable position from which
>to critique hipsterism as a challenge; ignoring it, it did not rise above
>postures of self-defense and projection. Instead, when audience members
>began to contribute to the discussion, it began to feel factional and
>accusatory, as if many had gathered to accuse everyone else of being
>hipsters, or at least to mock n+1 itself for presuming it had somehow
>escaped hipsterism and insult its editors to their faces and show them
>what pretentious hipsters they themselves are. They seemed to want to peg
>n+1 as a hipster vehicle, as failing to escape the trap it sometimes seems
>to wish to spring on others. (One audience member asked the n+1 editor if
>he was afraid the magazine would get too many readers, because presumably
>there are some readers who shouldn’t be allowed to subscribe, who would
>tarnish the brand.
>"Somewhat inexplicably, these “wrong†sort of readers were associated
>in the questioner’s mind with Slavoj Žižek, his trendiness among
>philosophical name-dropperrs, and his alleged nihilism. Perhaps his
>question was whether n+1 feared becoming trendy and then thereby
>vulnerable to the nonsensical and non-comprehending attacks and dismissals
>that Žižek himself is subjected to by the likkes of this questioner.) The
>faint air of self-satisfaction inherent in the premise of a post-hipster
>conference grew thicker and thicker, and the tacit and necessary agreement
>to use terminology in the same way to move forward was increasingly
>ignored. Some even seemed to confuse hipsterism with an artistic
>avant-garde when they are in fact opposites by definition (by my
>definition anyway, and by any that would make the hipster a discrete
>object of analysis). "There was some discussion of the hipster as the
>embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when
>pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics. But one could hear
>mutterings in the crowd that no one had the right to judge what cultural
>products were better than others, and it was clear that this audience was
>not ready to surrender cultural relativism and subjectivism, that they
>still wanted to remain mired in that endless fight. (Statement actually
>overheard in the lecture hall: “What gives you the right to say that
>Charles in Charge is not important!â€)[...]"
you are a treasure. This is excellent!
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)